A Levant Journal (Paperback or Softback)

An eloquent glimpse of the humanity behind the headlines by one of the twentieth century's greatest writers.

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963, poet, essayist, diarist, and diplomat George Seferis stands as one of the giants of twentieth-century literature. His poetry has long been recognized for its lyric purity, its charged sense of history, and its economy. His no-less marvelous prose extends his preoccupation with tradition into a more daily register, and his journals, in particular, graph the meeting of the poet's sensibility and the landscape where present confronts past. A Levant Journal offers selections from the notebooks Seferis kept during his diplomatic postings in the region. Covering the years 1941–44 and 1953–56, they record his detailed impressions of Beirut, Amman, Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, Cyprus, Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, and various other sites he visited while working there. With characteristic vividness and concision, Seferis reflects both on what he sees and what lies behind (and ahead of) the visible, as the journals include superb passages of travel writing and meditations on the Levant's Hellenistic legacy, the holy sites of the region, the history of prominent British women travelers to the area, the future of British imperialism, and of course the turbulent politics of his day. As such, the journals move between private and public dimensions of the poet's life and provide an intimate look into Seferis's world.

GEORGE SEFERIS was born in Smyrna in 1900 and moved with his family to Athens when he was fourteen. He was appointed to the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1926 and subsequently served in Athens, London, and Albania, before accompanying the Greek government in exile to Crete, Egypt, and South Africa. He was stationed in Cairo from 1942-44 and served as Ambassador to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq from 1953-56. His books of poems include Mythistorema (1935), Thrush (1947), and Logbook I, II, III (1940, 1944, 1955). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963 and died in Athens 1971. RODERICK BEATON is Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, King's College London (University of London). He is the author of Ariadne's Children, a novel, numerous scholarly works on modern Greek literature, and, most recently, George Seferis, Waiting for the Angel: A Biography, which the New York Times Book Review called "gripping reading definitive." A.E. STALLINGS is the Oxford Professor of Poetry and multi-award winning poet whose accolades include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Poets' Prize, and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. Her books include Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), Olives (2012), Like (2018), and This Afterlife (2022).